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The rise of ECMAScript – Goodbye 2015

What is ECMAScript?

As per Wiki- ECMAScript(European Computer Manufacturers Association) is a trademarked [1]scripting languagespecification standardized by Ecma International in ECMA-262 and ISO/IEC 16262. We use various implementations of ECMAScript for client side scripting on web. Examples are JavaScript, ActionScript and Jscript.

ECMAScript was developed by Brendan Eich- Father of JavaScript. It was named Mocha, then Livescript and finally JavaScript.

ECMAScript7: The rise of compilers

After ES6 (2015), there was huge rise in number of developers switching from traditional way of writing JavaScript to start using compiled code generators. Compiled code generators compiles code written in other languages to JavaScript. Our favourite JS code compiler is Babel(https://babeljs.io/) as it is actively supporting ES7 (ECMAScript 2016). For example Babel compiles following code:

Gulp and Grunt: Automate your workflows

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. – Bill Gates

With active usage of tools like Gulp and Grunt companies and developers started automating workflows for JavaScript applications. These tools helped developers in doing lot of automated tasks like library upgrade, automated testing, folder structure creation and so on. If you didn’t use Gulp and Grunt in your projects till now and make a New Year resolution to automate your build process and automate JavaScript tasks for an easier life.

The incredible Node.JS

Node.js foundation grew to more than 3 million users. Companies like Intel, IBM and Joyent used Node.js to create software architectures, real-time location tracking services and IoT. With npm lives of developers became lot easier as they could do a lot of heavy architecture creation using CLI. Also I heard companies switching from traditional Java/PHP technology stack to next gen Node.js for their active products.

How rise of ECMAScript revolutionized cross-platform apps

This year we saw a lot of people moving from native to cross-platform and vice versa. Keeping same codebase across all platforms helped companies and developers to launch their products in really less time when compared to writing code in different languages for each platform. With tools like npm creating a Cordova application became one liner.